“The whole place was blazing,” Simon answered. “It was worst in the part which I now gather was called the west wing. There was fire in the hall, and the stairs had begun to burn. Part of the passage I had to go down to reach Kennet’s room was also alight.”
“I take it that with all that fire there would be a great deal of smoke and fumes.”
“There was quite a bit.”
“I understand that you were quite…er…groggy when you came out.”
“Only for a moment. It passed off very quickly.”
“But I take it that if you had stayed in the house any longer than you did, you would inevitably have been overcome by the smoke and fumes and lost consciousness.”
“I suppose so, eventually.”
“To look at you, Mr Templar, one would certainly get the impression that your physical condition was exceptionally good.”
“I’ve always got around all right.”
There was a pause. The Coroner turned to the jury.
“Mr Templar modestly tells us that he gets around all right,” he stated. “You can see for yourselves that he has the build and bearing of an unusually strong and athletic man. You will therefore agree that his powers of resistance to such things as smoke and fumes are probably higher than the average, and certainly immeasurably greater than those of a slightly-built sedentary type such as the late Mr Kennet, whose constitution I am told was always somewhat delicate. I want you to bear this in mind a little later on.”
He turned back to the Saint.
“You appear to have acted with singular courage, Mr Templar,” he said. “I’m sure that that is quite obvious to all of us here in spite of the modest way in which you have told your story. I should like to compliment you on your extremely gallant attempt to save this unfortunate young man’s life. Next witness, please.”
A glint of steel came into the Saint’s eyes. He knew that the Coroner had had a good talk with the party from Whiteways, and it had been evident from the start of the proceedings that everything was laid out to lead up to a verdict of accidental death with as little fuss as possible. That was all very well, and the Saint had quite enjoyed himself while he was waiting for his turn. But now he realised that he was not intended to have a turn. His own evidence had been adroitly manoeuvred towards bolstering up the desired verdict, and the Coroner, warned about him in time, was getting rid of him with a pontifical pat on the back before he had a chance to derange the well-oiled machinery. Which was not by any means the Saint’s idea.
“Haven’t the jury any questions?” he asked breezily.
He turned towards them and looked hard at the black-bearded little man, who was sitting slumped disconsolately in his chair. There was something compelling about his direct gaze.
The black-bearded little man’s figure straightened, and an eager light came into his eyes. He rose.
“Yus,” he said defiantly. “I’ve got some questions.”
The Coroner’s hands tightened together.
“Very well,” he snapped. “Go on and ask your questions.”
The way in which he spoke explained to the entire audience that the questions could only be a pointless waste of their time as much as his own.
The little man turned to Simon.
“You’re the chap they call the Saint, ain’t you?” he said. “You’ve ’ad a lot of experience of crime—murders, and that sort o’ thing.”
Before Simon could answer, the Coroner intervened.
“Mr Templar’s past life, and any nickname by which he may be known to the public, are not subjects which we have to consider at this inquiry. Kindly confine your questions to facts relevant to the case.”
There was an awkward pause. The little juryman’s attitude was still undaunted, but he didn’t seem to know what to say next. He looked about him desperately, as if searching the room for inspiration. Finally he spoke.
“Do you think there was something fishy about this fire?” he demanded.
“Mr Templar’s personal opinions are not matters which concern this court,” interrupted the Coroner sternly.
The Saint smiled. He looked at the little juryman, and spoke very clearly and distinctly.
“Yes,” he said. “I think there were a lot of very fishy things about it.”
There was a moment of silence so heavy that it seemed almost solid. And then it broke in a babble of twittering speculation that surged over the room as if a swarm of bees had been turned loose. There was a craning of necks all over the court, a quick rustling of notebooks among the reporters.
Simon stood at his ease, absorbing the pleasant radiations of the sensation he had created. Well, he reflected, he had certainly done it now. He glanced at the rows of seats where the party from Whiteways was sitting. Luker’s expression had not changed; he wore his usual cold stony mask. Fairweather looked acutely unhappy; he could not meet the Saint’s gaze. The General and Lady Sangore had adopted an indignant pose of having nothing to do with what was going on; they sat as if red-hot pokers had been inserted into their backs and they were pretending not to notice it.
Simon’s glance travelled on and found the faces of Peter and Patricia among the scatter of pink blobs that were turned up to him. He held their eyes for a moment with a message of impenitent devilry.
The jury were goggling at him open-mouthed, with the sole exception of the small black-bearded man, who had taken up a Napoleonic posture with his arms proudly folded and a radiance of anarchistic joy on his face. The Coroner had gone slightly purple; he banged on the table in front of him.
“Silence!” he shouted. “Silence, or I’ll have the court cleared!”
He turned angrily on Simon.
“We are not interested in your theories, Mr Templar, and you had no right to make such a statement. You will please remember that this is a court of law.”
“I’m trying to,” said the Saint unflinchingly. “I thought I was summoned here to give evidence. I haven’t had the chance to give any yet. I’m not offering theories. I’m trying to draw attention to one or two very curious and even fishy facts which I have not been allowed to mention.”
“What are they?” chirped the little juryman exultantly, before the Coroner could speak again.
“For instance,” said the Saint, “there is the fact which I noticed, which the lady who was with me noticed, and which even the police who were on the scene must have noticed, that every ground-floor window in sight was open, producing a draught which must have materially helped the growth of the fire.”
Fairweather stood up.
“I could have explained that if it had been brought up before,” he said. “It is true that most of the windows were probably open. It was a warm evening, and they had been open all day. It has always been the butler’s duty to lock up the house before he retires, and it had completely escaped my attention that he was not there to do it that night when we went to bed. He would, of course, have locked up as soon as he came in, but unfortunately the fire started before that.”
“Thank you, Mr Fairweather.”
The Coroner shifted his papers on his desk again, with two or three aimless jerky movements, as if to gain time to re-establish his domination. Then he leaned back again to put his fingertips together and went on in a more trenchant voice.
“This is a regrettable but instructive example of the danger of jumping to rash conclusions. It is one very good reason why the personal opinions of witnesses are not admissible in evidence. There are some people whose warped minds are prone to place a malicious interpretation on anything of which the true explanation is beyond their limited intelligence. There are also persons whose desire for cheap notoriety leads them to distort and exaggerate without restraint when they find themselves temporarily in the public eye, in the hope of attracting more attention to themselves. It is the duty of a court to protect the reputations of other witnesses, and the open-mindedness of the jury, from the harm which may be done by such irresponsible insinuations…In this ca
se, an insignificant fact which is not contested has been brought up with much ado. But so far from supporting the suggestion that there is something ‘fishy’ involved, to any normal and intelligent person it merely confines the chain of mischances through which the deceased lost his life.”
“All right,” said the Saint, through his teeth. “Then why was Kennet’s door locked?”
The Coroner lost his head for a moment.
“How do you know it was locked?”
“Because I saw it. I got as far as his room, and I could have got him out if I could have got in. But it was locked, and it was too strong to break down. I went back to get an axe, but the floor of the corridor caved in before I could get back.”
“Well, supposing his door was locked—what of it?” demanded the Coroner in an exasperated voice. “Why shouldn’t he lock his door?”
Simon spoke very gently and evenly.
“I imagine he had every reason for locking it,” he replied. “When a man goes to stay in a house full of his bitterest enemies, people whom he’s fighting with all the resources at his command, people to whom wholesale slaughter is merely a matter of business, he’s a fool if he doesn’t lock his door. But it hasn’t been proved that he did lock it. I simply said that his door was locked, and I might add that the key was not in it.”
“Beg pardon, sir.” The captain of the Fire Brigade stood up at the far end of the room. “I found a door key among the daybree in the libry.”
There was a hushed pause.
“Exactly,” said the Coroner, with sarcastic emphasis. “Kennet locked his door and took out the key. I fail to see any sinister implications in that—in fact, I have frequently done it myself.”
“And have you frequently held inquests without bringing any evidence to establish the cause of death?” retorted the Saint recklessly.
For an instant he thought that even he had gone too far. When he thought about it afterwards, in cold blood, the consequences that he had invited with it brought him out in a dank sweat. But at that moment he was too furious to care.
The Coroner had gone white around the nostrils.
“Mr Templar, you will withdraw that remark at once.”
“I apologise,” said the Saint immediately. It was the only thing to do. “Of course I withdraw it.”
“I have seen the body myself,” said the Coroner tightly. “And in a straightforward case like this, where there is absolutely no evidence to justify a suspicion of foul play, it is not thought necessary to add to the suffering of the relatives of the deceased by ordering an autopsy.”
He moved his hands over his blotter, looking down at them, and then he brought his eyes back to the Saint with grim decisiveness.
“I do not wish to repeat my previous remarks. But I cannot too strongly express the grave view which I take of such wild and unfounded accusations as you have made. I have only refrained from committing you for contempt of court because I prefer not to give you the publicity which you are doubtless seeking. But you had better go back to your seat at once, before I change my mind.”
Simon hesitated. Every instinct he had revolted against obedience. But he knew that there was nothing else he could do. He was as helpless as a fly caught in the meshes of a remorseless machine.
He bowed stiffly, and walked down from the dais into the midst of a silence in which the fall of a feather would have sounded deafening.
None of the party from Whiteways even looked at him. But he noticed, with one lonely tingle of hope, that Lady Valerie’s eyes were narrowed in an expression of intense concentrated thought. She seemed to be considering astounding possibilities.
The Coroner consulted inaudibly with the police sergeant, and then he cleared his throat again as he had done when the court opened. His well-scoured face wore a more tranquil expression.
“I don’t think we need to call any more witnesses,” he said.
He went on to give his summing-up to the jury. He pointed out that fires usually started by accident, and usually from the most trivial and unsuspected causes. He drew their attention to the fact that a number of fortuitous circumstances, for none of which Mr Fairweather or his guests were to blame, such as the heavily timbered construction of the house and the pardonably forgotten open windows, had contributed to make the fire far more serious than it might otherwise have been. He reminded them that it was by no means unusual for some people to be such sound sleepers that even an earthquake would not waken them, and that in the haste and stress of an emergency a verbal misunderstanding was even less extraordinary than it was in everyday life. And he urged them to dismiss from their minds altogether the fantastic accusations with which the issue had been confused, and to consider the case solely on the very simple and coherent evidence which had been placed before them.
In twenty minutes the seven jurors, including the black-bearded little man, who looked vaguely disappointed, brought back a verdict of death by misadventure.
2
A hungry pack of reporters fell on the Saint as he left the building. They formed a close circle round him.
“Come on, Saint; give us the story!”
“What’s the use?” Simon asked grittily. “You couldn’t print it.”
“Never mind that—tell us about it.”
“Well, what do you think?”
One of them pushed his hat on to the back of his head.
“It looks easy enough. Maybe Kennet was dead drunk, but they’d want to keep that dark for the sake of the old man. It doesn’t make much difference. It’s pretty obvious that the whole lot of them lost their heads and just ran like hares and left him behind, but with a crowd like that it’s bound to be hushed up. You couldn’t do anything about it. What was the use of asking for trouble?”
For a moment there was sheer homicide in the Saint’s eyes. So that was the net result of his desperate fight to block the whitewashing performance that had been put over not only under the very nose of Justice but with its vigorous co-operation. That was the entire product of the risks he had taken and the humiliation to which he had exposed himself—so that even a sensation-loving Press was inclined to regard him as having for once exhibited a somewhat egregious and unsophisticated stupidity.
And then he realised that that must not only be the Press but the general opinion. Whitewashing was understandable, something to whisper and wink knowingly about, but the truth that Simon Templar was convinced of was too much for them to swallow. Retired Generals, great financiers, and ex-Cabinet Ministers couldn’t conspire to cover up murder: it was one of those things which simply did not happen.
His flash of rage died in a hopeless weariness.
“Maybe I like trouble,” he rasped, and pushed his way out of the group.
He had seen Peter and Patricia coming out. He took their arms, one on each side of him, and led them silently across the road into the pub opposite.
They took their drinks at the bar, and carried them over to a quiet corner by the window. The room was deserted, and for a while nobody broke the silence. Patricia’s face was struggling between thunder and tears.
“You were magnificent, boy,” she said at last. “I could have murdered that Coroner.”
“But what good could you do?” Peter asked helplessly.
Simon took a cigarette and lighted it with tense deliberate fingers. The bitterness had sunk deeper into him, condensing and coalescing into one white-hot drop of searing energy from which the savage power of its combustion was driving with transmuted fierceness through every inch of his being. Perhaps he had failed disastrously in the first round, but he was still on his feet, and the marrow of his bones had turned to iron. His first pull of smoke came back between lips that had settled into a relentless fighting line.
“None,” he said curtly. “No good at all. But it had to be tried. And that lets us out. The rest of the argument is a free-for-all with no holds barred.”
“What did you tell the reporters?” asked Peter.
“Nothing
. They didn’t want telling. They told me. As far as they’re concerned, it was all just a routine set-up to gloss over the fact that the Whiteways gang were all too busy saving their own skins to worry about anybody else…It was instructive, too, now I come to think about it. I was wondering how they’d managed to fix that Coroner—dumb as he was. I think I can see it now. They let him think he was doing just what the reporters thought he was doing, and of course he was obviously the type who could be counted on to stand by the Old School…Not that it matters now, anyway. They got their verdict, and the case is officially closed.”
“The fireman said that he found the key,” Peter observed.
Simon nodded.
“That was the worst mistake I’ve made so far—I told Luker the key wasn’t in the door when I was trying to get a reaction out of him on the night of the fire. If he’d overlooked that, he’d’ve had plenty of chances to sling it in through a window afterwards. But I don’t think even that really made much difference.”
Peter raised his tankard again and drank moodily.
Patricia emptied her glass.
She said presently, “I saw you get hold of your girlfriend, but I didn’t see you take my clothes off her.”
“It was rather a public place,” said the Saint. “But she’s a nice girl, and never goes out with the same man twice unless he’s a millionaire. Or unless a millionaire asks her to. Which is why she was running around with young Kennet. Fairweather was the philanthropist who wanted him led back into the fold, and he was ready to buy a thousand-guinea fur coat to see it done. And Fairweather was the guy who arranged for him to come down for the weekend. I got that much—and more.”
The first taut-strung intensity of his manner was passing off, giving way before the slow return of the old exhilarant zest of battle which the other two knew so well. What was past was past, but the fight went on. And he was still in it. He began to feel the familiar tingle of impetuous vitality creeping again along his nerves, and the smoke came again through the first tentative glimmer of a Saintly smile.
“We were right, boys and girl,” he said, “our old friends the arms racketeers are on the warpath again. Luker, Fairweather, and Sangore, just as we sorted them out, with Luker pulling the strings and Fairweather and Sangore playing ball. The Sons of France are in it too, though I don’t know how. But there’s something big blowing up, and you can bet that whatever it is the arms manufacturers are going to end up in the money, even if a few million suckers do get killed in the process. Kennet had a bee about the arms racket; he’d been scratching around after them, and somehow or other he’d got on to something.”
The Saint Plays with Fire (The Saint Series) Page 7
